Ralph Waldo Emerson

IN bringing forward my reflections upon the life and writings of the great man named at the head of this article, I shall not attempt to measure him, or to make an inventory of the gifts with which he has enriched this age. Such attempt would be premature and presumptuous. For a small acquaintance with the subject is sufficient to convince us that the influence of Emerson’s life and teachings has extended itself from the first, without any indications of culmination. The most recent traces show most acceleration, and the broadest and deepest effects. There is less of mannerism, less aping of superficial idiosyncrasy, and more of healthful development of character derived from his personality. It is only the verdict of ultimate success that decides the measure of human work. So long as the effects continue to unfold, so long the cause is revealing itself, and the inventory is not yet complete. But already the present achievement is so magnificent as easily to surpass our ability to see its limits, or to frame a conception that will include even its most important features. When the critic essays to sit in judgment on a great man, he is certain of only one success : he will pass judgment on himself beyond a peradventure, whether he helps us to an estimate of the hero or not.

Nevertheless, a decent respect for our benefactors requires that we celebrate their memory by recounting their service and applying the lesson of their lives. Under the cover of this formal requirement, the humblest person may venture to offer his tributes to the memory of the greatest man, and meet respectful treatment for the sake of his cause. I shall therefore make bold to describe my studies and their yieldings.

The first question asked by all, when a new phenomenal personage appears, is, “ What manner of man is he ? ” The answer expected is a name of some sort. Names classify, but it is the feeblest order of human intellect that is satisfied when it has named the new object. The more active intellect wishes to recall the characteristics of the class, and to recognize in detail their realization in the new individual.

If I class Emerson as a seer, it will be necessary to explain the sense in which the word is used, and the limits of its application.

Seers are various in their endowment. While they all partake, in extraordinary degree, of insight into reality, in some it is a vision of the what to do, the general form of action demanded in their times. The prophet or law-giver has this form of insight. He sees the general rules for self-consistent action, in which people may exercise their freedom, and not contradict one another or lame themselves. The social community at one epoch is preserved by one system of conventional usages, and at another by a different one. Witness the code of Manu and the code of Solon. But the diversity is comparatively superficial, with deep underlying sameness. The codes of ethics by which we characterize and discriminate nationality are the subtlest products of mind, and even the superficial differences are too deep for common understanding. Each person regards the ethical view into which he has been educated as the only true view of life. Another national life, that is founded on a different code, is incomprehensible. How can an Englishman understand the Chinese principle, that makes the family responsible instead of the individual; or the Hindu principle, that makes caste more fundamental than moral duty? Even in Europe, where ethical distinctions vanish in presence of the wide chasm that sunders them from those of Asia, there are still to be found stubborn barriers of national tastes and likings, which cannot be comprehended nor surmounted.

The prophet-seer has a clear vision of the various rules of the ethical code necessary for the prosperity of his people. Confucius, Manu, Gautama, Zoroaster, Moses, Solon, Lycurgus, Numa, Mahomet, are examples in varying degree.

Corresponding to the prophet - seer is the liero-seer, — the man who has the gift of discerning in exact detail the conditions necessary to form vast combinations of man with man and thing with thing, so as to produce great results for the nation or the race. The hero knows just how to accomplish the providential purpose of the time. He is haunted by it, and it takes possession of his whole being, so that he becomes the organ of its expression, and the mighty idea through him makes combinations of men and things, and appoints him their leader and guide. When the two kinds of genius are united, the person is both law-giver and leader, prophet and hero. Ordinarily the two attributes of insight are separate. The vision of the universal is dimmed by the attempt to apply it in detail, and the prophet cannot well announce universal laws and administer them.

The prophet and the hero have insight especially into the realm of the human and divine will. There is another order of seers, whose power of insight lies on the theoretical side of mind, including the poet and the philosopher or man of science.

There are many leaders, but only seldom a hero ; many law-makers, but only at rare intervals a prophet. So there are many poets and many philosophers, but few seers among them all.

What is the special insight that makes a seer of the poet or the philosopher ?

It would seem that the philosopher differs from the ordinary thinker or man of reflection in the fact that he sets up one principle wherewith to explain the world. The other man generalizes and has ideas, it may be of great depth and grasp, but he does not affirm one idea as the source of all. The moment he does this he is a philosopher, whether his principle is air, water, matter, atoms, mind, the ego, force, will, monad, or whatever else he selects. His first principle may be a very inadequate one, or a very adequate one; he is a philosopher, all the same. He is a seer only on condition that he discerns truly the fundamental essence, — sees it to be a spiritual first cause. I must propound this doctrine, hard as it will seem to many. A spiritual first principle makes mind the source of the universe and the explanation of nature and history. Mind is consciousness, personality, will, intellect, love. In the absolute personality intellect and will and love are one, because each in its perfection is all. The absolute self-knowledge which makes of itself an object thereby creates, or is, absolute will. But its self-made object is also one with it by love and recognition. Hence Plato called his first principle the good, inasmuch as he wished to indicate that it is a will in accordance with reason, and not a blind will, such as Schopenhauer sets up and Buddhism presupposes. Plato’s God creates the world as " like himself as possible,” for “ no goodness can have envy of anything.” Hence nature must be a revelation of infinite goodness, and man must have a divine origin and a divine destiny. Such is the doctrine in the Timæus.

Plato may stand for the philosophic seer of all time, — Plato or Aristotle, it makes little difference which ; for Aristotle reaffirms the same doctrine, and proceeds to show in detail the explanation of nature and man, as the revelation of divine reason. That the ultimate presupposition of all science is a personal first cause or absolute reason is evident to the philosopher who has learned to think in the school of Plato and Aristotle, or in the schools of their greatest followers; it is seen to be implied in the fact that the one from whence all proceeds is necessarily selfactive and self-determined. Even if it is called water, or air, or matter as first principle, it must be causa sui. All things are to be explained as produced by its activity, and as growing or perishing through it. The self-determined is both subject and object of its activity, and this must be identified as mind, — or has been thus identified by the thinkers mentioned who follow Aristotle or Plato.

As to the poet-seer, something similar must be affirmed of him. His insight is into the supremacy of personality ; nature and each particular thing in nature are there for the revelation of mind. Both the external and the internal forms of the poetic expression proceed on this presupposition. The internal form of poetry is trope or metaphor, and personification. By the latter figure, nature and the beings of nature are personified by the poet, and made to think and feel and act like man. By metaphor, a partial identity is discovered and expressed, so that nature illustrates mind, and becomes the expression of mind or the spiritual. By this internal form of poetry is established the vision of the identity of nature and mind, the latter being the true essence, and the former being the utterance or expression of it; identity here being used in the sense that Schelling and Hegel use it, as of unity formed by dependence and correlativity. The dependent (that is, nature) is not a whole by itself, but only in and through mind ; hence it does not exist in itself, but only in the mind of its creator.

The external form of poetry concerns, not the trope and personification, but the musical arrangement of words ; rhythm being the essential, and rhyme the unessential feature. Rhythm consists in the recurrence of equal intervals of time, and hence in their correspondence or agreement. Here the principle of identity appears again. There shall be sameness under difference, so that that which seems other or alien and foreign shall be recognized as one’s self. The breaking through of the perceiving mind into this identity under the difference is accompanied with delight, — the delight of reason finding itself in senseperception. The deeper and more complete the difference, and the more complete the identity found under it, the higher and more refined the æsthetic taste that it appeals to. The savage adorns himself with beads, feeling the symbolism of his empty consciousness (subject and object being one in consciousness, because consciousness means the knowing of self) in the empty identity of things as like as two beads. Or his ear is pleased with the monotonous noise of the drum, or cymbal, or the pipe with a single tone. The more civilized the man, the more complex his life, the deeper his differences, which he must unite by the unity of his intellect or the purpose of his will; hence he needs for art expression more variety of means, and gets beyond simple regularity to the enjoyment of symmetry, and finally of harmony. In harmony the unity or identity is deeply hidden under difference. In rhyme, or recurrence of the same sound, an additional means is added to the external form of poetic expression, but it has the same import as rhythm, — the expression of identity under difference, and the symbolism of the fact of consciousness or of mind. Rhyme indicates more externality, more highly developed emotional nature, in its poets than mere rhythm; just as music of the most complex form — that of Beethoven— implies great refinement in the same direction.

I have apparently dwelt on these distinctions too long, but I trust not so in reality, because there are many questions regarding Mr. Emerson’s poetry, as well as his philosophy, which turn on the theory one may form of poetry.

The external form of poetry consists not only in rhythm and rhyme, but in parallelism and correspondence. Not only Hebrew poetry finds its poetic dress in this feature, but the poetry of all Christian nations has been more or less affected by it, especially in its elevated moods. “ The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handy-work. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night shewetli knowledge.” Here the parallelism appears : (1) in synonyms, or identity of meaning with difference of words (heavens, firmament) ; (2) tautology, or repetition of the same word (day unto day, night unto night) ; (3) correspondence of expression and thing expressed (glory of God and his handywork ; uttereth, sheweth, speech, knowledge). In Tennyson’s great ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, we have in the first lines an abandonment of the external rhythm and rhyme for the internal rhythm of thought that the Hebrew poets used. “ Bury the great Duke ” is repeated (tautology), and “ with an empire’s lamentation ” is varied in expression, so that “ lamentation ” becomes “ noise of the mourning,” and “ empire’s ” becomes “ of a mighty nation " (synonyms and correspondence of the general with the specific).

Emerson very often uses the Hebrew device of rhyme of thought in his poetry, though not omitting, if sometimes slighting, the external rhyme and rhythm. From his Sphinx we quote, —

Here we have tautology and correspondence of contrasted elements (sleeping and waking, life and death, known and unknown, fate and meaning, manchild and man, etc.).

In this matter of music in Emerson’s poetry, one must do the poet the justice to remember his wonderful elocution. With proper emphasis, and especially with the emphasis of quantity or time, many of the seeming violations of metre and rhyme are seen to be fine graces of poetic expression.

The essence of poetic expression consists not in forms of rhythm or rhyme, but in the imagery of trope and personification. Here is Emerson’s great claim to be called a poet. For we must place him in the rank of poet-seers.

The vision of the revelation of mind in nature is Emerson’s possession throughout his literary career. No other poet since Shakespeare has been endowed with so clear and sustained insight into the transcendency of mind in the visible world. His means of expression are not adequate enough, musically, to justify comparison with Shakespeare or Spenser ; but in the “ internal form of poetry,” as it has been defined, Emerson has no superior.

In Shakespeare we find nature in its freshness and wildness, and yet transparent to its depths with correspondence to mind. Emerson lives in an age of natural science, and commands wonderful discoveries of laws which give an abstract unity to nature not suspected in the time of the Elizabethan poets. Strangely enough, these abstract laws have been supposed to make poetry impossible in our age. Emerson never wearies of the story of these new discoveries, and finds at once their spiritual significance. His poetry, therefore, has this new element unknown to earlier poets, — the element of natural science interpreted as poetic revelation of mind. The freshness and wildness of nature as Shakespeare depicts it are also found in Emerson’s nature-poems. If we study the means by which this fine effect is produced, we shall reach a sort of justification of a degree of carelessness in respect to metre. The beauty of nature demands a certain neglect of regularity and symmetry in order to reach freedom and gracefulness in the suggestion of boundless resources of form, and of emancipation from mechanical conformity to laws and types. Physical material is mechanical as we find it in the laws of our reflection, but in nature there is the suggestion of transcendence over all mechanism. The poet is attracted by this, in proportion to his endowment with the gift of seership. The rhymesters who “ wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake ” (as Emerson characterizes them) might admire landscape gardening, but the better poets would admire the native forest.

In Hamatreya, Woodnotes, Monadnoc, May Day, and in shorter poems, like The Humblebee, we seem to taste the genuine untamed nature, and find in it the relief and restfulness that Shakespeare gives us in his Forest of Arden :

We note how the expression of unconventional freedom is effected through the sudden transitions of metre. In the Woodnotes we have, —

In Merlin the poet gives us his theory of poetic expression. It is often quoted:

In the second part of Merlin he explains the spiritual meaning of the poet’s rhymes: how

The seer’s vision here becomes as prophetic as that of Odin, “ when he hung nine whole nights on the wind-rocked tree Yggdrasil, and learned his potent runes and obtained a draught of the precious mead.”

The power to use the modern scientific view of nature poetically is seen especially in the little poems called Elements. Take as an example the one on Compensation : —

The one prefixed to the treatise on Nature says, —*

Such insights into the alchemy of nature (the explanation of nature scientifically, as being everywhere the struggle to reach consciousness and the form of man) is in harmony with what science has discovered, but the point of view is that of Plato, and Schelling, and Oken. The recognition of the great physicist, Tyndall, who finds Emerson a poet and a profoundly religious man, accepting all discoveries of science without dismay, is a valuable testimony.

It is the opinion of many of Emerson’s most intelligent disciples that his verses will outlast his prose. His poems may be classed as a whole under that class of literature called “ oracles,” to which the Vedic and Orphic hymns belong. They are so far removed from the jingle of popular poetry, and express such subtleties of thought, that the best of them will never become favorites with the great public, although they are likely to gain in fame for some ages.

As commentary on my definition of the poetic seer, I quote from the essay on Poetry and Imagination, in the volume Letters and Social Aims : —

“ Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing; to pass the brute body, and search the life and reason which cause it to exist.”

“ The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value as symbols ; that nature is the immense shadow of man.”

“For the value of a trope is that the hearer is one ; and, indeed, nature itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are tropes. . . . The thoughts of God pause but a moment in any form. All thinking is analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy.”

Looking next at the definition given of the philosopher, we may consider in this connection the doctrines presented in Emerson’s prose works and his style of literary composition.

The philosopher should be one who sets up one principle as the explanation of all things. Emerson, it will be said, takes the soul, or the “ over-soul,” for such a principle, and in so far is a philosopher. This is true, notwithstanding the protest of Emerson that he is not a philosopher.

He is not a philosopher of the argumentative sort, and draws no conclusions by the syllogism. Such argumentation is usually called “ proof,” and great emphasis is placed upon it. The seer, of whatever kind, has never been known to value the so-called “ proofs ” of logic. It seems, in fact, too much like child’s play to assume in one’s major premise some point that we wish to establish, and then to draw it out triumphantly by the aid of a syllogism, as if something were thereby " proved ” or made more certain. Such logical syllogizing is rarely used by people in earnest about truth, but only by those who are yet unacquainted with its nature and are without faith in its reality. To triumph over an unwary adversary is generally sought by such people, and preferred to the privilege of learning something from him. But such ratiocination is a movement in a circle. It is simple egotism when reduced to its lowest terms. The process of true proof does not proceed in the manner of argumentation ; it does not assume its whole result in its premises, and then draw them out syllogistically. But it is rather what Plato describes the dialectic to be in book seventh of his Republic;¹ it is a method of investigating the pre-suppositions implied in an assumption, and thence progressing towards a comprehension of the totality.

There is an aspect in which the philosopher finds himself opposed to the poet, and in this phase Emerson does not side with the philosopher, but with the poet. I refer to the use of method. The philosopher should endeavor to see his first principle as active in the development of the imperfect towards the perfect. The genesis should interest him. The poet does not care for method. It seems to him too much like studying the anatomy of thought.

The lowest stage of thinking sees objects as though isolated, while the second stage, that of reflection, sees every thing as relative and dependent. The third and highest stage of thought thinks all things as self-related, or as having their explanation through the self-determined being, or mind. The seer takes this latter point of viewT. As poet-seer, he sees nature and history as expression of mind. As philosopher, he endeavors to learn the method by which mere things are connected with mind, and how their process of change reveals this connection. The study of method seems never to have attracted Emerson, but to have been repulsive, although in general terms he recognized nature to be a revelation of the divine as a process (“ Striving to be man, the worm,” etc.).

Standing on the same plane of insight with the highest philosophic thinker, therefore, Emerson declined to employ philosophic method, or to see, in method also, a revelation of the soul, as Plato had taught. He remained a poet, or else, in his writings that have a bearing on history and the social institutions, he went over to the stand-point of the seer as law-giver, and preached the true ethics of this day and generation.

Connected with his repudiation of logical and philosophic method is his much-discussed lack of unity in his essays. The London Times says (April 29, 1882), “ Some of his best essays are a jumble of pretty things, — so many of the choicest pearls which have never been strung,” etc. It has been often said that his essays may be read backwards, sentence by sentence, without material injury to the sense.

There are two kinds of unity that may be observed. Logical unity connects the parts of a discourse by dependence, so that there are premises stated and finally united in a conclusion. The highest species of this kind of unity is the dialectical, as used by Plato, where the shallowest views are, one after the other, presented and discussed, each giving place to a counterpart that corrects the special weakness of the former, but soon reveals one of its own, which has to be corrected by a new theory. The insight grows gradually by the aid of method, until we reach the comprehension of the whole in all its phases, and we no longer set up a mere partial view for the entire subject. Aristotle omits the dramatic phase, and is content to recapitulate historically the different views that have been held ; referring each to its author and criticising it, and then dismissing it and proceeding to another, without seeming to care at all whether the next view is related to the previous one as an outgrowth of it, or as an effort to supply its deficiencies. He is the more careful to enumerate all the possible theories on the subject under consideration, and to be very explicit in the statement of the defects. For he had doubtless had experience under his master, Plato, of the vagueness and ambiguity that attaches to the dialectic species of proof when not thoroughly mastered. The neophyte is bewildered by the masquerade of opinions, and takes now this, and now that, for Plato’s real conviction, and finally gives up in despair. No one has been able to find a positive doctrine in certain ones of the Dialogues. Many seem content with sapping the foundation of dogmatism. They leave the mind wavering and distrustful, after the manner of the first lessons of the great sophists, Prodicus and Gorgias.

The other species of unity is the socalled “ organic unity,” which Coleridge introduced to English-speaking people. In an organism each part is alike means and end of all the others, we are told. In a work of art, as a dramatic poem, or a statue, or a sonata of Beethoven, all the parts have an organic relation to the whole. Each has its place and function, and is essential. If lopped off, mutilation occurs. The ideal of the whole is evident upon examination of each part, and consequently we miss the other parts if they are lacking, just as we miss the arms of the Venus of Melos, or of the torso of the Belvedere. This organic unity it is that enables us to restore the fragments of classic art, — to unite the Niobe family into a group, etc.

In music and poetry, the arts in which time is the form of the sensuous element, we have a sequence of parts, and hence, quite naturally, the portrayal of growth or progressive development. There arises some sort of collision, wherein the finite makes an attack upon the infinite, — some breach of law, moral or statutory ; and then a mediation follows and equilibrium is restored by the destruction or correction of the offending finite element. Thus we have a phase in which the elements are depicted as they were before the collision, and the motives of the collision are exhibited ; then the collision itself, with attending circumstances; lastly, the recoil of the outraged universal, and this forms the dénoûment.

In Emerson’s poetry we find a quite natural adherence to the requirements of organic unity, although recent poetry — that since Goethe’s time— does not feel it necessary to put in all the connecting links of motives, but thinks it less prosaic to let the imagination fill in these details when their results are actually shown. By this device, poetry gets a new power of presenting universal objects, such as institutions or principles, — taking a well-marked instance, and letting it stand for a type ; in one we see all and each.

I have been at the pains to test this principle of unity on several of Emerson’s poems. Here is the obvious sequence of motives in The Sphinx. Subtler readers will find other chains of motivation underlying this one : —

“ The Sphinx is drowsy,” because she has waited so long for an answer to her question regarding the meaning of man and his destiny. While the palm, the elephant, the waves, and the “ journeying atoms, primordial wholes,” — in fact, all unconscious nature, — is at one with itself, and even “ the peace of all being shines in the eyes” of the human infant, yet man “ crouches and blushes, absconds and conceals ; ” “ an oaf, an accomplice, he poisons the ground. " Here is the collision: nature at harmony and man at self-opposition, with contradiction within; having a conscience which convicts him, he alone is full of discontent with his actual state. Nature asks, “ Who has drugged my boy’s cup,” and poisoned it with sadness and madness ? And the poet answers the inquiry of Nature regarding the problem of human life : Man alone of animals has the vision of the ideal or divine, and cannot he any more tranced by the Lethe of Nature. He must always dive profounder, and “ to his ayerolling orbit no goal shall arrive.” To every good there is a better. Even error and sin are surmounted by shame and repentance. The Sphinx has her riddle answered, and a sudden transformation takes place. Ancient Œdipus answered “ Man ” to the riddle of the Theban Sphinx: “Who goes in the morning on four feet, two at noon, and three at night?” “And the Sphinx was precipitated from the rock.” But the Œdipus answer was left a riddle. Emerson’s poem unriddles the enigma and its answer by Œdipus, and shows us its content. The Egyptian spirit brooded over the question whether man was merely a being of nature, or whether he began a new and higher order of existence, transcending nature. Beings of nature belong in cycles : only the species lives ; the individuals all perish. The Sphinx riddle is the burden of history : Does man belong to those forms in whom the individual is also the species ? Greek art answers, Yes. Christianity answers, Yes. All European civilization is built on this answer. Emerson sees the Sphinx now in nature as purple cloud, silvered moon, yellow flame, blossoms red, foaming wave, Monadnoc’s head. Nature gladly confesses to him, —

For man is always a question, a Sphinxriddle, whose actual need is to be brought into the form of his ideal. Nature’s forms only image to man in fragmentary manner the soul that he has.

In the poem Each and All we see the red-cloaked clown, the heifer, the sexton “ tolling his bell at noon,” all unconscious of their part in the whole. “ Nor knowest thou what argument thy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent.” “ I thought to secure the bird’s song by encaging him. I brought home the delicate shells from the sea-shore, but I had left behind the beauty with the river and sky, with the wild uproar of the sea. I am tired of this seeming, of this unripe cheat of beauty.” But he makes the experience that the synthesis that creates beauty is more real than the perishable things that compose its elements : —

In The Sphinx Emerson gives his evidence of seership, and all his subsequent poems and prose essays repeat the same solution to the problem of life with new and varied forms. All nature and all history tell the story of incarnation of the divine. It is this sameness under difference that delights us in art, — the symbol of the soul.

In the poem Uriel we have the insight expressed that all deeds return upon their doer, that all influences return to their source, as the fundamental divine law of the universe. Uriel (the “ Light of God ”) “ gave his sentiment divine,” that there is no straight line in the universe : everything is circular ; all rays return if produced. “ Evil will bless and ice will burn,” or opposites return through opposites, because all dependent beings exist only in and through what they depend on. This “ rash word boded ill to all . . . the bounds of good and ill were rent.” Then Uriel withdraws into his excess of light and is seen no more, although his voice still speaks in things wherever the good is born of evil.

In Emerson’s prose works the question of unity is more difficult. In his first work, the book on Nature, he divides and subdivides, carefully securing the unity of classification. By “nature” he means “ all which philosophy distinguishes as the Not me ; that is, both nature and art, and other men, and my own body.” This he discusses under well-defined aspects. I. Commodity, or nature as useful to man for food, clothing, and shelter, and the social advantages of civilization. II. Beauty: (1) as delight; (2) as revelation of spiritual force ; (3) as self-knowledge. III. Nature helps man to language: (1) words being signs of natural facts; (2) particular natural facts symbolizing particular spiritual facts; (3) nature as a whole the symbol of spirit as a whole. IV. Nature is a discipline, and educates (1) the intellect; (2) the conscience. V. Idealism results from a contemplation of the function of nature as discipline : “It is a sufficient account of that appearance we call the world that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations which we call sun, moon, etc.” Culture leads to this idealism: (1) change of view changes the object, and thus nature contributes to apprise us that the world is only a spectacle; (2) the poet transfigures nature, and imposes his own forms on it; (3) the thinker finds truth, and explains appearance by its grounds; (4) intellectual science reveals the substantiality of ideas, and begets doubts of the existence of matter apart from mind; (5) religion (“ human duties commencing from God ”) and ethics (“ human duties commencing from man ”) put nature under foot, and preach the lesson : “ The things that are seen are temporal; the things that are unseen are eternal.” VI, “ The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God in the unconscious.” VII. “The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or blank that we see when we look at nature is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent, but opaque.” “ Build then your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, the world will unfold its great proportions.”

Here is certainly order and arrangement that reaches below mere classification. He considers nature in its superficial aspects first, and proceeds towards the deeper and more central phases of his subject in logical order. Each topic leads to the next one as its own proper enlargement, just as the plant grows from bud to blossom, and thence to fruit and seed, and the end is a beginning.

Logical and dialectical unity in a treatise imply a discussion of the imperfect or rudimentary phases first. If one writes only from the final point of view, and speaks of things only from the ultimate ideal, then there is no progress possible in his essay, either logical or organic.

This is the explanation of Emerson’s apparent deficiency in organic unity and logical sequence in much of his writing. It is a treatment of things sub quadem specie æternitatis, and therefore not subject to the time element.

In essays which relate to concrete affairs, classification is possible, and Emerson has availed himself of it. Wherever a genesis is attempted, logical order of sequence is necessary and is attained. In English Traits the matter is wisely arranged. You have first the occasion of his visit; then, in order, follow considerations on the land, race, ability, manners, etc., each one lifting us to the next without confusion. Every essay of Emerson is the result of much sifting and classifying. Seeing everything in its most universal aspects, as is habitual with him, it is quite natural that each suggests all to him. Accordingly, he resolutely excludes, by successive siftings, the matter that is less directly connected with his central theme, and retains only that which best illustrates his thought, and builds it out into a solid structure.

The essay on Experience is an attractive study to the one interested in Emerson’s method. First, experience conducts us to consciousness of illusion. “We discover, subsequently, that the present was a king in the disguise of a beggar.” Then experience suggests to us the cause of present illusion in temperament. It is structure that limits our vision ; we cannot spring away from our own shadows. Then experience lifts the veil a little, and we perceive the use of succession ; it helps emancipate us from temperament and what is special and fixed, correcting one limitation by substituting another. We go from particular to particular, and find each a new revelation of the whole. But succession of narrow and excluding particulars does not make us wise ; it helps us see, by and by, that all events form a surface. We must unite those onesided particulars into one view, and correct our superficiality. Experience brings us, on some occasion, to a deeper view, and thus ushers in surprise. “Life is a series of surprises” of this kind, if it is worth living; that is to say, it is our deep thoughts that give unity to our experience, and thus make us our own masters. Now we begin to perceive the true reality underlying all this illusion and succession and surface, for we perceive reality through those deeper insights that come to us in our saner moments as surprises. Now we discern the trend of the world, the purpose of the universe, and recognize reason as the only creative force; energizing out there in nature and within me as the moral law and as the light of all my seeing. So experience now brings him to “ Subject or the One,” as he calls it, and he learns the great lesson of the inseparability of one’s being from his own deeds ; he is self-made, and therefore responsible for the evil that he finds in his own world. “The sentiment from which it sprang determines the dignity of any deed, and the question ever is not what you have done or forborne, but at whose command you have done or forborne it.” I cannot conceive of a unity, logical or organic, as being found there, although there is evidence of much sifting and classification for the sake of rhetorical (may I say ?) consecutiveness. Each paragraph is a statement of the one great fact, and each sentence is also a full statement. Almost any paragraph may be separated so as to make each sentence a paragraph by itself, and the series will form a choice chapter of “ pearls of wisdom,” or proverbs ; each one of which is complete by itself, and yet is in unity with all the rest, because it states the same great truth with some new form of expression. Hence the unity is deeper than logical or even organic ; it is absolute identity of idea.

After this analysis of experience, see how wonderfully he sums up the world of wisdom — of which his essay is a most condensed epitome and a dialectic evolution of its chief momenta — in the oracular verses prefixed to the essay ; forming an epitome of an epitome, but so sublime that it reminds one of Faust’s visit to the Mothers :² —

While a true genetic development may be traced in such essays as that on Experience, I have not been able to discover it in The Over-Soul, nor in Spiritual Laws, nor in any essays of that exalted type.³

Take the following as a sample, not specially culled, and separate it as suggested. It forms but one paragraph in the original (page 260, The Over-Soul) with ten sentences, and will be found to contain the doctrine of the whole essay, while each sentence of it repeats it with variations like the verses of Hebrew poetry: —

“ By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered, and, maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your genius will speak from you, and mine from me.

“ That which we are we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily.

“ Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened. “ The essays in his books are separate, and stand apart from one another, only mechanically bound by the lids of the volume; his paragraphs in each essay are distinct and disconnected, or but loosely bound to one another. It is so with sentences in the paragraph, and propositions in the sentence. Take, for example, his essay on Experience; it is distributed into seven parts, which treat respectively of Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, and Subjectiveness. These seven brigadiers are put in one army, with as little unity of action as any seven Mexican officers; not subject to one head, nor “ The infallible index of true progress is found in the tone the man takes. fighting on the same side. The subordinates under these generals are in no better order and discipline; sometimes the corporal commands the king. But this very lack of order gives variety of form. You can never anticipate him. One half the essay never suggests the rest. If he have no order, he never sets his method agoing, and himself, with his audience, goes to sleep, trusting that he, they, and the logical conclusion will all come out alive and waking at the last, He trusts nothing to the discipline of his camp; all to the fidelity of the individual soldiers.”

“ Character teaches over our head.

“ Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together, can hinder him from being deferential to a higher spirit than his own.

“ If he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build (shall I say?) of all his opinions, will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will.

“ If he have found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable circumstances.

“ The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having is another.”

Looking towards our classification of insight, as manifested in four orders of seers, we find Emerson, a seer, as poet. The seer has insight into the spiritual reality that creates the world. In this respect all seers are alike, and are in sympathy one with another. Emerson has the strongest sympathy for Plato, the dialectic philosopher par excellence, and yet he never makes a display of method though it is the constant effort of Plato. He obeys its law, however, and follows very subtle intimations of unity and sequence of genesis wherever he deals with a subject which unfolds in time, as experience must necessarily do. But he dislikes the parade of method, and shuns what he has called the “ anatomy of thought.” He is more nearly allied to the seer as prophet than to the philosopher, perhaps, inasmuch as he goes beyond the revelation of the eternal beauty to the revelation of the good rather than of the true.

His writings have continually tended towards ethical themes, in late years. From the beginning, as appears in his work on Nature, the ethical view had attracted him powerfully.

His volume on The Conduct of Life represents the culmination of his thought respecting the structure of society. Thoughts like those found in the lecture on Conservatism, in 1841, here receive their fullest statement. In seeing and uttering ethical laws specially befitting our modified conditions, he is the prophet of our century. He has admired and praised the precocious ethics of Asia more than any other writer. China, India, Persia, reached, according to him, the highest vision of the good. Perhaps his verdict will need some correction, inasmuch as the Orient has never outgrown the political forms of despotism. The ethical views of Asia were developed early, because the need was great for personal good behavior from those in authority. Where all government is conducted by irresponsible rulers, the happiness of the people depends entirely on the wisdom and moderation of the despot. Europe and America have outgrown that phase, and it is comparatively of little moment with us whether the sovereign is amiable or not.

Be this as it may, Emerson has translated for us the ethical code of the world, and published an edition of it for a people with local self-government. No one has preached more solemnly to us of our duties in a free government. Trickery and cunning, demagoguery, — these have received his rebuke, but their presence has never made him despair of our civilization. His teachings have borne noble fruit in this direction, and I believe that every American has received some impulse from Emerson that gives him greater moral courage and causes him to deal with his fellow men more frankly and generously than before. Self-respect has been taught us as the foundation of free government.

His insight, which is distinguished as poetic quite sharply from philosophic insight into method, is also again quite sharply distinguished as ethical from religious insight. He seems to have an almost morbid repugnance for the mechanical formalities of more pietism.

The original Transcendental movement was chiefly a struggle for independence on the part of literature which had been subservient to theology, and had not enjoyed sufficient freedom to permit of the growth of any original forms. Emerson was the great leader of the movement, and he alone of all saw the end from the beginning, and never participated in any merely negative excursions. In his lecture on the Conservative, as well as other lectures at the time (1841) on The Reformer and The Transcendentalist, and on the Times, he was careful to assume a judicial attitude and deal fairly by all parties.

If the institution of property, said he, seems to deprive the individual of his birthright to a piece of land to live on, yet it has preserved for him the rational achievements of the race, “ libraries, museums, and galleries, colleges, palaces, hospitals, observatories, cities, — Rome and Memphis, Constantinople, and Vienna, and Paris, and London, and New York.” It has summed up for him the total net product of mankind, of his larger selfhood, — the “ grand man,” of whom he, the little man is the mere possibility or germ, —and thus presented to him a revelation of himself such as the ages only could make. Without the help of this revelation he would inevitably be a savage ; with its aid he can become a civilized human being, and in a score of years realize in himself what it took his race many thousands of years to accomplish.

There is left for the reformer the appeal to personal self-activity and heroism as the higher destiny of the individual, as against the indolent acceptance of comfort at the hands of society.

“ There is a cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everything they give. I look bigger, but am less; I have more clothes, but am not so warm, more armor but less courage, more books but less wit.” “ I want the necessity of supplying my own wants. All this costly culture of yours is not necessary. Greatness does not need it. Yonder peasant, who sits neglected there in a corner, carries a whole revolution of men and nature in his head, which shall be a sacred history to some future ages. For man is the end of nature.” “Conservatism takes a low view of every part of human action and passion. Its religion ... is always mitigations, never remedies ; pardons for sin, funeral honors, never self-help, renovation, virtue. Its social and political action strives to keep out wind and weather, and bring the day and year about, and make the world last for our day ; but not to sit on the world and steer it, and sink the memory of the past in the glory of a new and more excellent creation.”

“ Religion in such hands loses its essence. Instead of that reliance in the eternity of truth and duty, men are misled into a reliance on institutions. When the falsehood of the preaching is detected and exposed, all good citizens cry, Hush ! Do not weaken the state ; do not take off the strait-jacket from dangerous persons. Every honest fellow must keep up the hoax the best he can. . . . What a compliment we pay to the good Spirit with our superserviceable zeal! ”

His lofty scorn of mere prudential support of the highest spiritual activity of the soul led him to plant himself firmly outside of the churches, and proclaim the sovereignty of ethics.

“ I fear that what is called religion, but is perhaps pew-holding, not obeys, but conceals the moral sentiment.”

“ We are in transition from the worship of the fathers, which enshrined the law in a private and personal history, to a worship which recognizes the true eternity of the law, its presence to you and me, its equal energy in what is called brute nature as in what is called sacred history. The next age will behold God in the ethical laws, as mankind begins to see them in this age, — self-executing, instantaneous, and selfaffirmed, needing no voucher, no prophet, and no miracle besides their own irresistibility; and will regard natural history, private fortunes, and polities, not for themselves, as we have done, but as illustrations of those laws, of that beatitude and love. Nature is too thin a screen ; the glory of the One breaks in everywhere.”

His statement of this supreme ethical principle is more explicit in the following : —

“ What touches any thread in the vast web of being touches me. I am representative of the whole, and the good of the whole, or what I call the right, makes me invulnerable.

“ How came this creaation so magically woven that nothing can do me mischief but myself ; that an invisible fence surrounds my being, which screens me from all harm that I will to resist ? If I will to stand upright, the creation cannot bend me. But if I violate myself, if I commit a crime, the lightning loiters by the speed of retribution ; and every act is not hereafter, but instantaneously, rewarded according to its quality. Virtue is the adopting of this dictate of the universal mind by the individual will. Character is the habit of this obedience, and religion is the accompanying emotion, — the emotion of reverence which the presence of the universal mind ever excites in the individual.”

His attitude towards the church necessarily provoked its hostility, and has continued to the present the greatest bar to his influence upon his countrymen, — a bar, however, which will inevitably go down, sooner or later.

On the side of positive religion perhaps his strongest utterance is the following : —

“ Unlovely, nay, frightful, is the solitude of the soul which is without God in the world : to wander all day in the sunlight among the tribes of animals, unrelated to anything better; to behold the horse, cow, and bird, and to foresee an equal and speedy end to him and them. No, the bird, as it hurried by, with its bold and perfect flight, would disclaim his sympathy, and declare him an outcast. To see men pursuing in faith their varied action, warm-hearted, providing for their children, loving their friends, performing their promises, — what are they to this chill, houseless, fatherless, aimless Cain, the man who hears only the sound of his own footsteps in God’s resplendent creation ? To him, it is no creation ; to him, these fair creatures are hapless spectres ; he knows not what to make of it. To him, heaven and earth have lost their beauty. How gloomy is the day, and upon yonder shining pond what melancholy light! I cannot keep the sun in heaven, if you take away the purpose that animates him. The ball, indeed, is there, but his power to cheer, to illuminate the heart as well as the atmosphere, is gone forever. It is a lamp-wick for meanest uses. The words, great, venerable, have lost their meaning : every thought loses all its depth, and has become mere surface.” ⁴

After one has discussed his books, only half of the subject has been treated. The personal life of Emerson is as remarkable as his literary work. Never in modern times do we hear of a personality so serene and august, so sweet and sane, as that of Emerson throughout his long life. He was the founder of the institution of the lyceum, and visited all parts of the country, reading his lectures. The presence of the man did more to educate the people than the substance of his lectures. All who saw him were inspired to live more ideal lives. In his own village, the humblest neighbor, as he passed Emerson on the street, received a look of recognition and a smile full of benignancy, and walked on with the feeling of one who had received the blessing of a priest.

The biographical side will not get written soon, but will gradually grow into form by small contributions from each of the many contemporaries who knew Emerson. His letters and personal reminiscences, if, fortunately, they shall be given to the world, will do much to reveal the man to us. The biography of Pythagoras, with all its marvels of personality, had no more wonderful subject than that of Emerson will have. He is the one person who had supreme manners. Justice measures the individual by his ideal standard, and returns his deed upon him, as though he freely chose for himself the evil or good he showed toward others. Courtesy looks to the ideal, too, but it refuses to see any deed of the individual that is not in harmony with that ideal. It receives the individual with that reverence and humility that one would show towards a superior intelligence, for the ideal of each person is the same transcendent being. Emerson’s demeanor towards others was of so lofty a pattern that every day’s life would, if faithfully described, furnish lessons of surpassing nobility and loveliness.

W. T. Harris.